Obscured by Clouds. The rough and ready blog of a cloud benighted biologist and amateur astronomer. Astroblog will cover my interests in astronomy, biology and Life, the Universe and Everything.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Back from the bush

Venus shines below the head of the scorpion, as usual, click to enlarge the image.

Okay, I'm back from swanning around in the scrub around Nortons Summit. One disadvantage to going bush is that, well, there is bush. You get relatively dark skies (Norton Summit is only one hour from the city centre), but all these trees get in the way. I got the above image on my Olympus mju:300 digital in between a gap in the trees, as seen from our verandah. I shot off an entire roll of film on my Pentax KM, got the ISS passing Venus, an Irridium flare and some more shots of Venus and Scorpio. Now I have to wait for them to develop to see what they look like.

Of course my first priorities are to finalize Octobers' Skywatch and get my final articles in for November/December Sky&Space, so things may not be too exciting except for the Mercury-Jupiter conjunction.

Looking forward to seeing your pictures! I remember seeing the Southern sky from a dark site for the first time: the family I was staying with in Sydney took me to stay near Mudgee for a weekend, it was absolutely stunning.

Sounds like the weather has improved a bit there. It's not been so good here in the UK, I took my camera to work today for the partial eclipse but it was rather cloudy :-(

What a beggar about the annalunar eclipse. Maybe Stuart had better weather. Unfortunately, Norton Summit wasn't as dark as it could hav ebeen due to high level haze, but the Satellite pictures should be interesting.

It was thick cloud up in Scotland on Monday morning. However, I did manage to catch the eclipse for a split second through some slightly thinner cloud. It couldn't have been more than about 25% covered though.